For those who read productivity sites like 43 folders or Life Hacker this methodology is well known to you.

At the urging of Lenn Pryor back when I worked at Microsoft I read David’s book and later went to one of his seminars with Lenn. Found it useful to step up my game and keep up with an increasing flow of stuff in my life.

Lately I’ve been feeling under water and have been getting distracted by life and Twitter and friendfeed and needed a recharge.

Translated: I was off the wagon and my life was a bit of a mess and needed to take a fresh look at my life, where I was headed, and I needed a system to deal with the hundreds of emails and tons of Tweets, friendfeed items, blogs, facebook messages and wall posts, and all that.

I was apprehensive, though, for a while. I had never had a coach sit down and look through my life and my email.

Would he admonish me? Would he find some new way to torture me?

Turned out my apprehension was misplaced.

We started the morning with a little interview that I filmed. I was expecting to do a lot more videos during the day, but turned out that I had so much work to do to get me more productive that we focused only on that.

So, what happens during such a coaching?

First Michael did a session where he reminded me of the basics of the Getting Things Done methodology. A refresher course.

Then he took out a yellow pad and had me write one thing at a time that I could think of that I needed to do.

Things like:

**Talk to Seagate about sponsorship next year.
**Buy power supply for camera (I left mine in a hotel in Davos).
**Plan next month’s interviews.
**Get oil changed on car.

We ended up with a stack of about 50 of these before I started running out of things that I could think of to do.

It’s weird, I’m embarrassed to admit he taught me a TON about how Outlook works. Why am I embarrassed? Because I’ve been using Outlook for more than a decade and just hadn’t discovered all sorts of weird ways that it can be customized to build task lists.

Anyway, I have a ton of work to do to continue what I learned yesterday, so we’ll talk more about how this changed my life in the upcoming weeks.